22 Shows To Go!

Vacation is over (but I'm taking the day off work anyway, because I am still a little jet lagged - all those damn time zones between here & New York!), so I'm sitting here listening to Christmas music in preparation for my World Famous Christmas Show, which I'll be doing in about a month. A month! It didn't even take Jesus a month to die on the cross!

Just got finished feeding my brood & have been going over the piles of nonsense I have for today's show about birthdays. A moderately exciting thing is happening today, besides it being Girlfriend's Birthday Eve & the general happy excitement of doing a radio show for the nice people: today I get a new apprentice!

Remember, KOOP welcomes newcomers into the station to train to be programmers twice a year, & part of the training process is to be paired with "seasoned" (that means recovering from some addiction) programmers to learn the ropes. I don't know anything about ropes, but I can tie my shoes, so I am assigned an apprentice. You may remember my apprentices from the previous season:

Gary: the rugged, no-holds-barred Midwesterner who has given me more stitches than anyone since the schoolyard bully in elementary school; &
Stephanie: the rugged, no-holds-barred chick from Houston whose inability to stop kicking me in the teeth made for hours of hilariously bloody radio.

Gary may still be around. His day job (he's the state executioner for some Middle Eastern potentate) keeps him busy, though. Stephanie, alas, had to go back to Houston because the city missed her too much. It was getting all weepy & talking with its mouth full of chocolate. What could she do?

It's bittersweet - my apprentice this week & the other one (I don't know why I always get two) next week will be the last apprentices I'll have at KOOP. But they're new! So with only 22 shows to go - wow! New voices on Self Help Radio!

Bad To Verse

"This is the first vacation you didn't finish a book," says my girlfriend Magda. It's true. There was too much to do!

I didn't relax enough, but then, what else are subways for? It's my own fault. I was listening to the lovely subway song that begins, "Stand clear of the closing doors please!"

Much as I constantly confuse the names of the colors (but not the colors) orange & green, or the names of the times of day (but not the times of day) midnight & noon, I have always confused "verse" & "prose." "Prose" has never seemed prosaic to me. & "verse" sounds like an insult. So while what I am writing now is more definitely not verse, I don't really think it's prose, either. In my mind, prose rhymes. With "rose." & "nose." & "those hose."

None of which explains why I should have or could have but did not finish a book over the last five days. I also didn't finish a crossword puzzle, but that doesn't bother me, seeing the half-assed attempts to solve crushingly easy sudoko puzzles in the in-flight magazine. What a wiener was sitting in my seat before me!

Oh oh, another weird thing is religious freaks in the subway. Who lets them in there? & above the Mason-Dixon line? They were handing out Chick Tracts!

What else? A radio show tomorrow! Aha!

Whither Birthdays?

No one really cares WHY I do the shows I do, so I've sort of stopped explaining. (But my love for the word "whither" lives on.)

There are some folks at KOOP who don't understand why I pick the themes I pick, but that keeps them from listening to my show, so saying why on my obscure little blog wouldn't help.

If I must explain: Suffice it to say, it's my wonderful girlfriend Magda's birthday this week, & there are tons of songs about birthdays (literally fourteen thousand pounds of them), & I figured I'd make it a regular thing.

Here's the tagline as if I advertised the show on television:

Is it your birthday? Have you recently had a birthday? Will you have a birthday this year or have you had one already this year? Then this show is for you!

I am still in New York, waiting for my previously mentioned wonderful girlfriend to wake up so we can begin our day. While most folks might finish their nights in gotham at a bar or in jail, we found ourselves last night at a vegan cupcake shop called Babycakes. The staff there were awesome & one of them had an iPod mix better than any jukebox I've heard in the city. The only scary thing: a picture of the owner with Martha Stewart. It almost made me regurgitate my spelt.

I've also seen old friends, new friends, near-relatives, men in business suits throwing up in the subway (okay, just one of those), Rockettes, bartenders eating apples & peanut butter, academics eating raw meat, the Park Slope food co-op, and lots, lots more.

Luckily when I see, I am also there to experience.

Preface To The Birthday Show: Another Year, Another Birthday

Does New York City have a birthday? How hard can it be to find out a day when a city was born? Pretty hard, actually - online encyclopedias give years, but not specific days. This must be a sneaky way to make sure a city has a birthday all year around!

I tried to find out when my home town of Garland, Texas, was born (answer: some time in 1891), but couldn't find a specific date. I did, however, find out that Garland has a Star Trek Lane. I knew there was a reason that I came from that city!

I shall visit it when I am there in Christmastime. For I am a major Star Trek nerd.

By the by, reading about artistical forms invented in New York in the wikipedia, I am surprised that the writer does not mention comic books. I am such a comic book geek that I really do expect to see super heroes in the skies above this city. At the very least, I am waiting for someone to tell me where the Baxter Building is.

What was I talking about? Ah yes, something about birthdays. Are days of creation the same as birthdays? Do my radio shows get born every Friday, or was the show born when I did my first show? (I know that to be October 9. My show expects presents.)

I dunno. My feet are sore because my girlfriend makes me walk everywhere. I am assuming they will fall off at some point, I'll miss my plane, & people will throw coins into my foot sockets as I make my living on the subways of New York. But that hasn't happened yet. I'll keep you posted.

NYC 11-07

Yes, yes, I'm in New York. It's chilly but I am getting to see both the trees in Central Park change color as well as steam pour from the manholes so it doesn't bother me. It's my girlfriend's birthday so this trip is for her, & we're going places & doing things she wants.

This affects you vis-a-vis my radio show in two ways. One, I have not updated the web page or my playlists on both the KOOP page & the myspace page, & b, I have not put up an mp3 of last week's show. I know, you'll not be able to sit at work & pretend it's Friday again today, & for that I am sorry. Not terribly sorry, though. I'm in New York!

Since it's officially Magda's Birthday Week, when I get back to do Self Help Radio on Friday, the show will be about birthdays. Not just hers. If you or anyone you know have a birthday, the show will be for you.

I'll try to continue writing from NYC. I'll also try to figure out what's making those manhole covers steam...